10 Minute Free Write: What Did Someone Kill?

My father killed the muskrat. The muskrat had been cornered by our dog Butchie. Butchie was barking, looking up at us, barking more, smiling at us. The raised shovel above my father's head threatened to fall on Butchie, but fell instead on the muskrat. I had no idea what a muskrat was. It came up from the creek, said my father. It was hiding behind the garbage cans, but it was only hiding. It was not trying to get into the garbage, it never had the chance. What does a muskrat do? Why did this one travel so far from home? What if it was friendly? I thought something so easily cornered and killed must have been friendly really. How afraid it must have felt, cowering in the corner behind the cans. It never stood a chance. My father picked it up by its tail and carried it to the communal burial pit in the back across the creek, the very pit Butchie would be laid to rest in years later. I looked away, averting my eyes from the gore I expected, averting my mind from the nothingness where once a muskrat had lived. I went back inside, sad and afraid, not knowing why the muskrat had to die. I went inside to find Gilligan and his friends waiting for me. The day my father killed the muskrat was the day I saw the depth of coldness in my father, the emptiness that kept him from appreciating the life of a small water-rodent that couldn't have harmed any of us, and wouldn't have stuck around to make mischief of our order. That was a bad day for the muskrat. The last thing he saw was the cold empty eyes of my father, shovel raised and ready for the death blow, killing without a thought for the young in the den, the errand unfinished, the mate left alone.

10 Minute Free Write: No One Asked

No one asked me how I felt about moving. My mother hopped up and down with glee when the call came from my father at work. We were leaving for a new country on a far continent. I was too young to know what any of it meant. I jumped up up down with my mother, caught in the net of her joy, a minnow. Swept in the emotion of the moment until I realized in one fast frown moving, going, means leaving, away from, I would be leaving all the I knew, my grandmother, my friends, my school, my back yard, my creek, my dog, leaving suddenly felt empty and as I landed from a hop I started to cry. The universe was opening up and swallowing me whole in its limitless emptiness. My mother stopped to hug me and reassure me that we would love it, that we would have a great life. This was my first experience of not knowing what to expect. That moment that hard wired me for all the next moments of newness -- now I always feel and fear the universe yawning and swallowing me, empty space pulls me apart in zero gravity, all that is large becomes tiny, all that is minuscule overwhelms. No one asked what I was thinking, no one asked what I felt. No one asked what I wanted or what might help me get through this. No one asked me if I needed a space ship for my journey, What I have striven to build for myself since that moment is a self-contained pod that can travel untouched through the vast reaches beyond what little I know, the small room that is my life into the hall of mirrors that always waits for me.